by Nancy Friday
Having paid scant attention to his own looks, he is unaware of girls’ self-consciousness regarding fat thighs, stringy hair, the pimple on our nose. He thinks we are Mistresses of the Universe, and we give him weaponry he didn’t know he had. Add to our lifelong care about appearance the recent arrival of The Curse, and every inch of beauty is now in question. All at the very moment when sexual desire fires our need to be wanted, chosen.
On his part, the boy hasn’t been held, or wanted to caress anyone, for years; this is what he spartanly taught himself to do without. Now he desires the girl, that very one with the pimple on her nose, which he doesn’t even notice. Out of practice and ill-equipped to assume the role of leader in courtship, he desires her, and she doesn’t even look his way. Feeling invisible and rejected, the boy takes the power she has given him; the fear in her eyes at being appraised, along with her wilting passivity, emboldens him to stare.
He does it crudely, with too much braggadocio so as to conquer anxiety. It is not at all how girls would have done it, were the role of initiator ours. We know how to kiss, stroke, cuddle, love, and certainly we know how to appraise other females. When his inept advances fall beneath our standards, we reject the gawky boy. We do not do it nicely, being angry at having to be so passive. He too stirs anger into his next effort. By the time he has conquered the art of looking at girls, there is a lot of hostility in his stare, most of it learned from us.
Outside Schwettman’s drugstore, the boys in their windbreakers leaned against the plate-glass window through which I could see the soda fountain, my favorite retreat just the day before. Today, not even the promise of a chocolate nut sundae could induce me to brush past The Judges. The boys were just passing time, doing nothing, but I was twelve, and to me they were a tribunal, a bank of eyes that had all the power in the world. This was my accustomed route home along King Street after the afternoon movie at The Gloria. I’d walked it hundreds of times, and now, overnight, it was a nightmare.
Ordinarily I loved a challenge, but here was a promise of failure that no amount of courage could match. To tell you the truth, I don’t even know if they looked at me, or if they did, what was in their eyes, but I felt their a priori rejection so keenly they might have been a firing squad. Oh, I walked past them; to detour around my accustomed route home was unthinkable. But I died. The odd thing is, I didn’t despise them; they hadn’t invented what I was feeling, this ancient failure to catch my mother’s eye.
I can barely remember how the boys themselves looked in these early days of adolescence; so keenly did we girls feel the focus of their orbs that it didn’t occur to us to use our own eyes. And so sure were we of inadequacies, so full of hate of our own bodies, that we projected self-contempt on to them. We filled their eyes with weaponry that we then assumed they used against us. A self-fulfilling prophecy. Where else could a boy learn that he had the same power his mother’s eyes had once had over him? He doesn’t consciously remember, which would be unmanly; instead, he decides that this is what men do: check out babes.
Nowadays I approach the sidewalk gauntlet with a mix of curiosity, a modicum of belief in my self-image, and, God knows, some leftover anxiety too. A rude remark, deliberately mean, my face grows hot. But I separate the mean bastard from the others lounging on the sidewalk eating their lunch; the bastard is the exception, I have come to believe, and not the rule.
Yes, boys chase girls, stand on corners and look at us, but first and always they hang out. Their intactness, their self-sufficiency without us, is maddening. When I was growing up, we would sometimes meet at one girl’s house and wait for the boys to find us: “Waiting for the boys.” Sooner or later they arrived; they always found us, but it was in their own time. We were meshed, we girls, but come adolescence, strangely incomplete without boys. It was our lack of autonomy, which we hadn’t practiced in the first years of life, that left us needing boys in that deep, emotional way that boys didn’t “need” us. Men love us, want us, don’t do well living on their own later without a woman, but they do not have that life-and-death fear that, beginning in adolescence, grips females.
Other afternoons we girls stood on the sidelines of the boys’ playing field, watching them engrossed in their game, content to finish it before they turned to us. Sometimes we stood for hours, unable to go home happily without them. What did we think we were feeling? It certainly wasn’t the excitement of the game that held us there giggling, waiting, pushing, pulling one another. We didn’t call it erotic desire. Moving to the boys’ playing field was simply a geographic transfer of our claustrophobic sleep-overs. Eros may have called us, but we were still joined at the hip; and while we looked at the boys, we kept a far more judgmental eye on one another.
Was it painful, reining in the inclination to take the initiative? What hurt most was the waiting, waiting, waiting for the phone to ring, for the boy to kiss me, for something to happen that I wanted with all my heart. It became my theme song, my explanation to myself for years and years after adolescence as to why I didn’t want to marry, not yet, and why I traveled, knowing always that there would be another interesting man around the next corner: “I’m waiting for something to happen.” What I was waiting for, I would learn, was to regain my natural talent as initiator.
I would imagine that if girls were raised to take the initiative with boys, share it, we would more naturally assume responsibility for ourselves sexually. All that waiting makes a girl/woman indolent, lazy, childish, and irresponsible. It would require years before I learned how wholeheartedly a man responds to a woman who will shoulder half the risk, but first I would have to learn to recognize that kind of man. That kind of man doesn’t want sex with a little girl. It would be a man who taught me to take responsibility for my sexuality. It was eye-opening. It was also he who awakened me to what I’d abandoned in adolescence—speech, speed, intellect, all of it—my little gift to boys.
Have women any idea how it feels to be rejected again and again? Sometimes the boy awakens in terror—the thought being the deed—from erotic dreams of people of his own sex. He doesn’t know it is natural to have such dreams; to him they often signal his failure at not “measuring up” to girls. The boy labels himself and says: “I must be gay.” Maybe he is, but maybe he isn’t. Women have wildly erotic day and night dreams of one another all our lives without putting our heterosexuality in question. The double standard isn’t always in men’s favor.
The girl doesn’t have an external organ that tells her when she is aroused. She has never seen a penis up close and associates everything between the legs as ugly and dirty. When he tries to guide her hand there, when he puts her hand on his naked penis, or shows her that he wants her to put her mouth “there,” she is repulsed. He is confused, hurt, rejected. He would worship at that place between her legs, just to touch it.
“No!” she commands. She hasn’t touched her own genitals, explored them with her fingers, and if she has masturbated, it has been with great guilt. That he, her romantic hero, who has just ignited her with his kisses, should now ruin everything by drawing her hand to the hard bulge in his trousers, or by exposing that big, red, ugly “thing”… why, she could weep. Maybe she does. Thus the boy learns how very different males and females are: He is bad and she is good.
This is how she sees him and herself. Very well, at least it’s better than being seen as the wimp he sometimes feels he is. Being “bad,” tough, sounds masculine. Therefore, if he is to further invade her citadel, he must play the dirty, sexual aggressor and she the princess; he must woo her with this not altogether unpleasant business of kissing, tentative touching, slowly winning a bit more ground, a bit more trust as her restraining hands put up less and less resistance.
Until adolescence he has not associated love and sex. In fact, given his love of mother and her dislike of his masturbation, he has separated love and sex. The boy is absolutely right; it is wonderful when they come together, but sex and love are different. The nicest of boys is now put in the unen
viable position of learning what turns girls on; the irony is that she believes the magic in her sexual arousal is in him. He has the key, is the key.
It is the boy’s job to introduce her to her forbidden/dirty/bad sex, while also remaining her Prince. She splits him in two. It is she who teaches him that no doesn’t always mean no. When she murmurs, “Oh, no, don’t do that!” even as her body curves into him, it is the signal for The Brute Boy in him to press on, to insist, even as, in his role as Prince, he whispers in her ear, “Oh, God, how I love you, you’re so beautiful, so sweet, oh, yes, please let me touch you, please, please, I love you so much…!” And so it goes, she wanting the sexual feeling but not wanting the responsibility for it unless sex is disguised as love. Meanwhile, the ugly penis, which is bigger than both of them, demands its reward, not unlike the troll that lived under the bridge.
After that night, whether or not there was intercourse, she will lie on her bed and re-create what she felt with the boy to the sound of romantic music, replacing herself in his arms and sensing it all again, he the powerful, dark force and she a lovely will-o’-the-wisp, and as the violins soar, the words in her head are: “Take me, bend me, make me feel ‘that way,’ out of my skin, out of my mind, high, Swept Away, Yours!”
The dreamy surrender in the best of romantic music is background to her fantasies of being taken, made to yield to his mastery, which pushes her past her “No,” making her a victim of love (her word for sex). She imagines herself wooed, captured. And he? She sees him as overcome by her beauty, the effect of it like a drug on his accustomed strong, withdrawn, tough self, maybe a little Sean Penn-ish, so bad and animal-like is he, for he must be hungry enough for both of them, meaning determined to thrust past her “No!” When he doesn’t telephone the next day, of course she accuses him of betrayal, imagining him prowling the streets in his lust, as she would if she were in his place. Men are starved for sex: projection.
She waits for his telephone call; how can he not want to reconnect? When the phone doesn’t ring, when she sees him with another girl, or when she is pregnant, she cries to him, “But you said you loved me! You said I was beautiful! I would never have done those things if I didn’t think you cared.” But he didn’t say he loved her, and even if he did, he didn’t know what she meant by love. In fairness to the boy, he sees the mutuality of their passion as an example of her knowing precisely what she was doing; he did.
In time, with repetition, the boy learns the sad truth: Girls, like mother, don’t like his penis; in fact, they think it is ugly, sinister, which isn’t too far from their opinion of sex itself. When he grows up, when he marries, the female image of the male erection is incompatible with the clean, nice, maternal image of his wife. For good sex—meaning dirty—he goes to whores.
If we girls take any initiative with men, we are divided from our friends. If he wants us, he must seem to pull us away from the other girls, who will then understand that he is an irresistible force, dark, mysterious, alien to women, but nonetheless our future. Girls must be seen by the other girls as leaving them only against our wills—The Rape of Europa—overcome by something against which we have no control. The confusion of “bad” sex that takes us away from Mommy/girls becomes a given; when men hurt us, or leave us, we return to women, who circle round and console: “There, there, that is how men are.”
The adolescent boy wouldn’t have a clue as to his mastery if we didn’t project it on to him in adolescence; when men later force us into sex, they are carrying out women’s opinion of them. And it will never change until girls are raised to understand and take charge of their sexuality, to give up the pose of the drowning nymph whose helpless body requires rescue. Instead of swooning, drifting, undulating in our provocative little dance in front of boys, girls must be raised to grab hold of their sexual selves with authority. Masturbation, as I’ve said, is a great lesson in responsibility, for it teaches girls that they and not the boy hold the key to their sexuality; having given herself an orgasm, the girl doesn’t transfer the power of her sex on to him, his kiss, his embrace. She is not good and he bad. They are equal.
The boy may not be proficient in sexual responsibility, but he has probably masturbated and before adolescence may have come to believe that his own magical fluid that spurts when he ejaculates has a power of its own. He knows that his seed is in his semen, and that while women carry the child, there can be no pregnancy without him—well, at least until sperm banks. Of course the boy fantasizes that the girl likes his ejaculation, his fantasy being her drinking it, and it remains one of men’s favorite fantasies throughout life. The “come shot” is the cherished climax of stag movies, showing men in their glory.
The adolescent boy may not have seen a stag film, but “the circle jerk” may have been part of growing up, leaving him ill-prepared for the girl’s repugnance to the suggestion that she might like to put her mouth on his penis. In Hunt’s study on sex in 1974, twice the number of young men had masturbated by age thirteen (63 percent) as had young women (33 percent). Since Hunt, various studies on adolescent sexuality have reported a range of figures, which show an increase in masturbation by girls, but what remains constant is that far more boys masturbate than do girls.
“Obviously… masturbation is not as reinforcing for women as it is for men,” commented the researchers in a 1993 study. “The usual explanation for this sex difference is that women have been socialized more than men to associate sex with romance and relationships and emotional intimacy. To be interested in sex solely for physical gratification is supposedly more taboo for women than for men… the recent effort to encourage women to take more responsibility for their own sexuality and the explicit suggestion to masturbate more has not altered this socialization process.”
Masturbation plays an interesting role in fairy tales. According to Bettelheim, the tale of “Jack and the Beanstalk” allays the boy’s fears that he will suffer terrible punishment if his masturbation is discovered. In another version, “Jack and His Magic Stick,” there is the implication that the stick allows him to stand up to his father for the first time, as well as to win the competition with other suitors for the princess; eventually Jack takes possession of the princess when The Stick beats off the wild animals. This is some stick!
All in all, Bettelheim assures us that the various tales of Jack and his stalk or stick make the boy feel better about his erections and masturbation while also teaching him that “after puberty, a boy must find constructive goals and work for them to become a useful member of society,” which I suppose means that he shouldn’t lie around all day and masturbate.
While Bettelheim reiterates that these fairy tales speak to both girls and boys, I am left to wonder how the girl finds acceptance and permission regarding masturbation in tales of sticks and stalks. Come to think of it, is there any comforting fairy tale for girls on masturbation?
Growing up without a man in the house, I have no memory of early images of penises, hard or soft. I grew to love the feel of one against me when we danced, but I neither pictured it nor gave a thought to what part of my own anatomy was so excited rubbing against it. For years, the penis would remain disassociated in my mind with the rest of the beloved boy, in the sense that until I held one in my hand and became familiar with it in my mouth, it bore no resemblance to the beauty of the rest of his form. Like oysters, the penis would be an acquired taste. What helped this to happen was the realization of the man’s gratitude, along with my own sense of power at being able to give a man so much pleasure.
Today, I study Mapplethorpe’s amazing photos of penises with unending curiosity; what a work of art is a man! And how tragic that the sexes, designed physically to fit together so beautifully, should psychologically have such a hard time of it. But here is the rub: Aside from anxiety regarding size, men tend to find their own design acceptable and ours divine, whereas we hate the sight of our own and are divided on any given day as to whether or not we like the look of a penis at all.
Alas, sex has never been a chapter in modern feminism. Masturbation, the joys of it as well as the responsibility and self-esteem it teaches, are not an accepted part of growing up in mother’s house. Girls still think our sex is something men bestow on us. Since we denigrate our sexual parts and the act of sex itself, it follows that we see men—who are the sexual people—as bad, dirty brutes. No honey-tongued man will ever convince a woman of the beauty of her body as well as she could instruct herself, and we hate them for failing. We look to boys and men to be our good mirrors; when they fail at convincing us that our breasts and cunts are beautiful, we are given all the more reason to remain with the authoritative and altogether negative opinion of other women. As for men, they are all the darker for liking their penises.
June Reinisch, director emerita of the Kinsey Institute, says that when asked what they want in a partner, men’s number one answer is “to be loved.” “Boys only want one thing” isn’t true; it is our projection, and in doing this we disregard everything else the boy desires—closeness, comfort, friendship, love. Already damned, he might as well live up to the image; what does he have to lose?
The girl projects on to the boy everything she would do if she were in his place, if the world did not forbid girls to be sexual self-starters. All of her life she has known that her breasts and her genitals have an innate imperfection. These are the very parts the boy wants to touch. What is she to do? To save herself and avoid the dilemma, she puts herself in his hands; he is both inventor of her bliss and responsible for whatever may come of this union. To him it was sex, to her it was an act of love; she is his. Her refusal to protect herself contraceptively is in keeping with her projection onto him of both the dirtiness of sex and his liability for her.